Sunday, April 26, 2015

Steam's Mod Marketplace

Valve has come up with a plan to allow mod-makers to sell mods on Steam. By and large the community reaction has been unfavorable. Many gamers are unhappy that something which was free, is now going to cost them money. On the other hand, a lot of industry players feel that it's only right that mod creators are paid for their efforts.

My thoughts are mixed. In addition to theoretical changes, there are also practical issues with Valve's plan.

Practical Issue - Revenue Split

The first issue is the revenue split that Valve is using. Valve takes 75% and the mod creator gets 25%. Now, Valve is probably giving a portion of their take to the original game creators, which is reasonably fair. I've seen estimates that ultimately Valve gets 25%, the game creator gets 50% and the mod maker gets 25%.

I don't think this is a sound plan in the long run. I remember reading an article on startups (by Joel Spolsky, I believe) and he gave the advice that if you make a startup with partners, you should split the ownership 50-50 (or 50%+1, 50%-1 for control issues). At 50-50, both of you are truly partners, truly financial equals. Trying to apportion responsibility and unequal ownership makes individuals resentful. In the long run that creates more problems than being a little over-generous in ownership.

In the same way, I think that Valve should strongly consider a system where the game creator and mod maker are treated as equals, as partners. A split like Valve 20%, game creator 40%, and mod maker 40% would be better. You give up a small amount of revenue, but the mod maker is an equal, a full partner instead of a junior partner.

Practical Issue - Copyright

Most mods are not compiled. That means that it is really easy for other people to copy the mods. Piracy in itself will be a problem for mod makers, but people reselling other people's mods, or creating derivative works, on Steam will be a problem for Valve.

Hopefully Valve puts up a reasonable barrier of entry for mod makers. Something along the lines of Apples $100 dev licence would be a good start.

Theoretical Issue - Open Source

Right now, mods operate much like the Open Source software community does. It isn't explicit, especially with licensing, but it's very similar. The thing is that, by and large, the Open Source movement works. In fact, it's very arguable that in a lot of areas, open source software has swallowed up closed source software.

I think the mod community will split into two. One that is for-profit using Steam's marketplace, and one that is open source, using the current distributions. Mods may even be explicitly licensed with the GPL or similar.

I think the open source mod community will end up crowding out the for-profit community. They will have more users and be able to hit critical mass a lot easier than the for-profit mods will. As well, most mods, unless they rely heavily on artwork, can be duplicated fairly easily. Think of how many different DPS parsers exist. If a for-profit mod becomes popular, I imagine that a free mod with the same functionality will appear quite quickly.

Perhaps ultimately most mods will be free and open-source, but a Premium version with a better user interface or extra options will be sold on Steam. Very similar to how many current open source programs are sold.

Conclusions

There is nothing wrong with selling mods on Steam for money. In fact, it's probably a good thing that mod makers get rewarded for their time and effort.

However, in the long run I don't think it will make much difference. The pressures that push towards open-sourcing software will exist in the mod community. Most mods are written not for profit, but "to scratch an itch" for the modder. That same philosophy will still exist.

This does not really apply to artwork-heavy projects, or massive mods which essentially change the game into something new and require a lot of content creation time. This might very well be a good platform to sell those types of mods. But realistically, there aren't that many of those mods made.

Of course, now that money is involved, anything that requires a team is going cause massive organizational headaches for amateurs. You may still see massive mods being released for free, just because everyone who worked on it getting nothing and doing it for fun is easier than trying to pay individuals for their contributions.

8 comments:

"This does not really apply to artwork-heavy projects, or massive mods which essentially change the game into something new and require a lot of content creation time. This might very well be a good platform to sell those types of mods. But realistically, there aren't that many of those mods made"

Depends on the game. Mount and Blade for instance has dozens of massive overhaul mods. Same for Skyrim or Total War games. The quality and even quantity of such mods will raise because of this change, which is a huge win for gamers.

As for your dps parser example, I agree, but simple mods like that aren't the focus here. I still remember back in my Nax40 raiding days our raid leader bought the Nax40 raid mod toolset (believe it cost $40 for the license); which was a huge collection of mods that just about everyone at the top tier of raiding had. Back then the way to get it (or even know about it) was shady. Thanks to this, maybe that will no longer be the case, while such projects will be able to reward their creators.

"The first issue is the revenue split that Valve is using. Valve takes 75% and the mod creator gets 25%. Now, Valve is probably giving a portion of their take to the original game creators, which is reasonably fair. I've seen estimates that ultimately Valve gets 25%, the game creator gets 50% and the mod maker gets 25%"

This is incorrect; the revenue split isn't decided by Valve. It's decided by the game publisher. It's Bethesda taking the 75%.

"Most mods are not compiled. That means that it is really easy for other people to copy the mods. Piracy in itself will be a problem for mod makers, but people reselling other people's mods, or creating derivative works, on Steam will be a problem for Valve."

They've addressed this too. Folks who are hosting on Nexus and other places are able to contact Valve to have anything ripped off removed, same as they are currently.

Interesting post. You're completely correct that small and simple mods will be hard to sell. However, I think you slightly underestimate the effect on the market for larger, more complex mods.

This is a point that a lot of the critics are making as well, but I think they get it wrong. They point out that in the past, people have created plenty of mods without needing to be paid for it. But of course we don't see the mods that were never made, so we can't know how many more there could have been.

I think that this project will lead to more big complex mods being created. Indeed, if it becomes popular enough we could see professional teams working on mods for the most popular games.

@JThelen, right, I'm just saying that Valve has to investigate the issue, and that will take manpower/resources. For example, suppose a pirate puts up the mod on a free site, then contacts Valve and says that the mod maker is the one doing the copying.

I'm suggesting a $100 fee to be an official mod maker. That adds a cost to be a mod maker, and makes it less likely that there will be shenanigans as shenanigans result in loss of official status.

Another good example might be 3E D&D, which was released with the d20/Open Gaming Licence, allowing third parties to legally make and sell products for D&D. It did produce a proliferation of 3rd-party products.

@Rohan, re 'why not make a new game' - because I'd say the difference for most mods, even the extensive ones, is of months versus years (with the same team size). Plus mod makers don't necessarily need the same skill set. Yes, dev teams don't write game engines themselves all the time, but still, the time and resources are magnitudes bigger than "just" doing a mod - even if it's an awesome total conversion.